The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] When we set out today to speak about anthroposophy and the Threefold Social Order movement with its various implications—which, after all, spring from anthroposophy and must essentially be conceived from within it—we must, above all, bear in mind that it is difficult to be understood. And without this awareness that it is difficult to be understood, we will hardly be able to succeed in a way that satisfies us as speakers on anthroposophical Spiritual Science and everything related to it. For if one is to speak properly about anthroposophy, one must actually speak quite differently from the way one is accustomed to speaking about things in general, according to the traditions of speech. Indeed, people have often become accustomed to speaking about anthroposophical matters in the same way they have become accustomed to speaking in general, particularly in this age of materialism. But this tends to obstruct understanding of anthroposophy rather than opening the way to it.

[ 2 ] First of all, we will have to make the content—the substance, so to speak—that confronts us in anthroposophy and its implications perfectly clear to ourselves. And as I said yesterday, in these lectures I will indeed be applying the art of oratory specifically to anthroposophical and related topics, so that what I have to say applies only to those subjects.

[ 3 ] We must now realize that, first of all, when it comes to—let’s say—the main point of the threefold order, a sense of it must first be awakened in our present-day humanity. Essentially, we must assume that a contemporary audience initially does not really know what to make of the concept of the threefold social order, and our presentation must gradually lead the audience to develop a sense of this threefold social order.

[ 4 ] During the era when materialism reigned, people had become accustomed to presenting the things of the external world in a descriptive manner in their speech. In the external world itself, there was a kind of guide. Moreover, the objects of the external world were, I would say, too fixed for people not to believe that how one spoke about them was ultimately irrelevant, as long as one provided people with guidance on how to perceive this external world. Well, and ultimately, it is indeed the case that: If, for example, one gives a popular experimental lecture somewhere and demonstrates to the audience how this or that substance reacts in a retort, then they see how that substance reacts in the retort, and whether one speaks about it in one way or another—a little better, a little less well, a little more accurately, a little less accurately—it really doesn’t matter in the end. And little by little, it has indeed come to be the case that people attend such lectures and talks primarily to see what is being experimented with, and whatever else is said is simply taken in as a kind of more or less pleasant or unpleasant background noise. One must express these things rather radically in order to point civilization in precisely the right direction regarding these matters. And when it comes to what one wants to inspire in people in terms of action and will, one thinks one must simply present ideals to them, that they must get used to grasping ideals—and then, little by little, one drifts further and further into utopianism when dealing with something like, for example, the threefold social order.

[ 5 ] And that is indeed how it has turned out in many respects: Many people who speak of the threefold social order today—by the very way they speak—give the impression that it is some kind of utopia, something one should strive for. And since people always assume that what is to be strived for will usually not be possible for another fifty or a hundred years—or, as some extend the timeframe even further—they then allow themselves, quite unconsciously, to speak of these things as if they would only be ready to be realized in a hundred or fifty years. One very quickly drifts away from reality and then discusses questions such as: How will a corner store be organized within the threefold social organism? What will the relationship of the individual to the sewing machine be like within the threefold social organism? — and so on. These questions are indeed asked in abundance in the face of an endeavor such as the threefold social organism. In the face of such an endeavor, which springs from reality with all its roots, one should certainly not speak in such a utopian manner. For one should at least always evoke the feeling that the threefold social order is not something one can “make”—make in the sense that one drafts constitutions in some parliament, such as the Weimar National Assembly was. Those are made! But one cannot speak in the same sense of “making” the threefold social organism.

[ 6 ] Nor can one speak of organizing things in such a way that the threefold structure would emerge. An organism is not something one organizes; it grows. It is precisely the nature of an organism that it does not need to be organized—it organizes itself. What can be organized is not an organism. We must approach things with these insights from the very beginning; otherwise, we will not be able to find the means for an appropriate expression.

[ 7 ] The threefold social order is something that simply arises from the natural coexistence of human beings. This natural coexistence can be distorted by extending—as has been the case, for example, in recent history—the characteristics of one element, the legal-state element, to the other two. Then these other two components are simply corrupted, because they cannot flourish—just as a person cannot flourish if one dresses him in an ill-fitting garment that is too heavy for him or the like.

[ 8 ] Within the natural context of human life, the threefold social order thrives; the independent spiritual life thrives; the legal or political life, which is based on human maturity, thrives; and the economic life, which takes shape solely from within itself, also thrives. One can impose constraints on spiritual life and on economic life, even though there is no need to do so; but then their independent life will continually assert itself, and what we then experience externally is precisely the assertion of that independent life. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate, from the nature of the human being and from the nature of social coexistence, the self-evident nature of the threefold social order. Let us consider how, in Europe, spiritual life was entirely independent and free up until the 13th and 14th centuries, when what had been a free, independent spiritual life was first pushed into the universities. It was precisely during this period that the universities were founded, and the universities then gradually slipped back into political life. So one can say: From roughly the 13th to the 16th and 17th centuries, the universities slipped into public life, and along with the universities—without people really noticing it—the other institutions of instruction and education followed suit. They simply followed in their wake. That is one aspect of it.

[ 9 ] And on the other hand, up until roughly the same period, we have free economic activity, which found its true Central European expression in the free economic village communities. And just as free intellectual life crept into the universities—which were initially localized and then came under the control of the state—so too does economic organization first take on a certain form of administration in the legal sense, as cities emerge more and more and these cities now organize this economic life, whereas previously it had developed organically when the village communities set the tone. And then we see how, time and again, what was centralized in the cities is now creeping into the larger territories of the states. We thus see how the trend of modern times is toward allowing, on the one hand, intellectual life and, on the other, economic life to permeate the states, which are increasingly taking on the character of territories constituted according to Roman law. That was, in fact, the development in modern times.

[ 10 ] And we have reached a point in historical development where things can no longer continue this way, where a heart and a mind for a free spiritual life must once again develop, because the spirit simply does not progress when it is in a straitjacket—it only appears to progress, but in truth it remains behind, never able to celebrate true births, but at most mere renaissances. And the same is true of economic life. We are simply living today in an age where we must absolutely reverse the movement that has developed precisely in the civilized world of Europe with its American following, where the opposite direction must set in. For that which has been developing for some time must reach a point where something new must begin. Otherwise, we run the risk of doing exactly what we would do if a plant were to grow and we were to say that we would not let it sprout, but rather let it continue to grow, let it keep blooming further and further. Wouldn’t it grow like this: producing a flower; then no sprout, but another flower, and another, and so on. It is therefore absolutely necessary to immerse oneself deeply in these matters and to develop a sense of the historical turning point at which we stand today.

[ 11 ] But just as every detail in an organism is necessarily shaped exactly as it is, so too in the world in which we live and which we help to shape, everything must be shaped in the way it must be shaped in its proper place, in accordance with the whole. If you think realistically, you cannot imagine that your earlobe would be shaped even in the slightest way differently than it actually is, in accordance with your entire organism. If your earlobe were shaped even a little differently, then you would also have to have a completely different nose, different fingertips, and so on. And so, too, the speech into which something pours that truly takes on new forms must—just as the earlobe is shaped in accordance with the whole person—be maintained in accordance with the whole matter.

[ 12 ] It cannot be conveyed in the manner one might learn, for example, from a sermon. For the sermon, as we still have it today, is based on a tradition that actually dates back to the ancient Orient; and it is based, after all, on the special relationship that people in the ancient Orient had with language. This characteristic has been carried forward, so that it lived on in a certain free form in Greece, lived on in Rome, and today shows its final flicker most clearly in the special relationship that the French have with their language. Not that I mean to say that every French person preaches when he speaks, but a relationship similar to that which must have developed from the Eastern attitude toward language certainly still lives on in the French use of language, albeit in a decidedly declining trend.

[ 13 ] This element, which we can examine from a linguistic perspective, came to the fore when people still learned to speak in much the same way as they would later—though by then already in a state of decline—learn from professors who, in effect, lived on like mummies from ancient times and bore the title “Professor of Eloquence.” In earlier times, there was such a professor of eloquence, of rhetoric, at almost every university, every school, and even at seminaries and so on. The famous Curtius in Berlin actually still officially held the title “Professor of Eloquence.” But history had become too tedious for him, and he did not deliver lectures on eloquence; rather, he demonstrated his role as Professor of Eloquence solely by the fact that he was always sent out by the faculty on festive occasions, because that had always been the duty of the Professor of Eloquence. Curtius, however, took great pains to fulfill his duty for such festive occasions by paying as little attention as possible to the old rules of eloquence. Moreover, he found it too trivial to be a professor of rhetoric in an age when professors of rhetoric no longer fit in, and so he lectured on art history—specifically, Greek art history. Yet in the university directory, he was listed as “Professor of Rhetoric.” This points us back to an element that was certainly present in speech in ancient times.

[ 14 ] Well, if we take something that is particularly characteristic—namely, the development of speech in Central European languages, such as German—then everything that can be described in the original sense by the word “eloquence” makes absolutely no sense at all. For something has already found its way into these languages that is quite different from what was characteristic of speech in the times when one had to take eloquence seriously. Eloquence exists in Greek and Latin. In the German language, however, eloquence is something entirely impossible if one looks inwardly at its essential nature.

[ 15 ] But today we are certainly living in a time of transition. What used to be, for example, the “speech element” of the German language cannot simply be discarded. We must definitely try to move beyond this speech element and enter into a different one. And this is one of the tasks that, in a certain sense, must be solved by anyone who is to speak fruitfully about anthroposophy or the threefold social order today. For only when a larger number of people are able to speak in this way will anthroposophy and the threefold social order be properly understood by the public—even in individual lectures—whereas there are quite a few who develop only a pseudo-understanding and make pseudo-professions of faith.

[ 16 ] When we look back at the distinctive feature of speech in the times from which the art of eloquence has been preserved, we must say: It was the case that language seemed to grow out of human beings in a completely naive way, just as their fingers grow, just as their permanent teeth grow. Through the process of imitation, speech emerged, and language emerged with its entire structure. And it was only after language that the use of thought developed.

[ 17 ] And now it was the case that when a person spoke to others about any given task, he had to ensure that the inner experience—the experience of thought—clicked into place, so to speak, within the language. The sentence structure was there. It was, in a certain way, elastic and flexible. And the element of thought was more inner than the language itself. One experienced the element of thought as something more inner than language and then allowed it to snap into place within language so that it fit, just as one shapes marble to fit the idea one has for a statue or the like. It was quite an artistic shaping of language. Even the way one had to speak in prose bore a certain resemblance to the way one had to express oneself in poetry. Rhetoric and eloquence had rules that were not at all dissimilar to the rules of poetic expression. I would like to add here, lest I be misunderstood, that the development of language does not in any way exclude poetry. What I am saying now applies to older forms of expression, and I ask that you not take this to mean that I am claiming there can be no poetry at all today. We simply need to treat language differently in poetry. But that is not the subject here; I only wish to add this as a aside so that I am not misunderstood.

[ 18 ] And if we now ask: How, then, was one supposed to speak in that era, when thought and emotional content were woven into language? — One was supposed to speak beautifully! That was the first task: to speak beautifully. Therefore, one can really only learn to speak beautifully by immersing oneself in the old way of speaking. One had to speak beautifully. And beautiful speech is indeed a gift bestowed upon humanity from the East. One might say: One had to speak beautifully to the extent that singing—the singing of language—was actually regarded as the ideal of speech. And preaching is only one form of this beautiful speech, in which much has been stripped away from it. For the fullness of beautiful speech lies in ritual speech. When ritual speech pours itself into a sermon, much has already been stripped away. But still, the sermon is a daughter of beautiful speech in ritual.

[ 19 ] The second form, which has found expression particularly in the German language and in similar languages, is one that is actually not conditioned at all, so that one can no longer really distinguish between the word and comprehension, the word and the experience of thought; the word has become abstract, so that it itself appears to be a kind of thought. It is the element in which an understanding of language itself has been stripped away. It can no longer “click into place,” because one perceives the thing that clicks and the thing into which it is to click as one and the same from the very beginning.

[ 20 ] Who, for example, in German today is aware—when writing down the word “Begriff”—that this is the substantivized form of “begreifen” (to grasp), that “Be-greifen” is thus “grasping” with a prefix—that is, the act of grasping something—and that “Begriff” is therefore nothing other than the substantivized form of concrete perception? The term “Begriff” was coined at a time when people still had a vivid sense of the etheric body that grasps things. Thus, back then, it was truly possible to form the concept of the concept, because grasping with the physical body is merely an image of grasping with the etheric body.

[ 21 ] But in order to hear the act of comprehension in the word “concept,” one must perceive language as an organism in its own right. In the element of speech I am now describing, language and concept are always intertwined; there is not at all that sharp separation that once existed in the East, where language is an organism—more external—and what is spoken lives internally. And when speaking, what lives inwardly must snap into the linguistic form—and indeed snap in such a way that what lives inwardly is the content, and that into which it snaps is the external form. And this snapping must take place in the sense of beauty, so that one is truly an artist of language when one wishes to speak.

[ 22 ] This is no longer the case, for example, when one no longer has the sense of distinguishing between “walking” and “running” in terms of language itself. Walking: two “e”s; one strolls along without exerting oneself; “e” is always the phonetic expression of the minimal involvement one has in one’s own activity. When there is an “au” in a word, this involvement is heightened. When running, one also ends up panting when the same vowel is present. Then one’s inner self is in turmoil. There must be a sound that indicates this inner change. But none of that exists anymore today; language has become abstract. It is like the thoughts themselves flowing by, for the entire central region and especially for the Western realm of civilization.

[ 23 ] In every single word, it is possible to see an image, a figure of speech, and one can live within this image just as one would within something relatively objective. Those who, in earlier times, were confronted with language would have been just as unable to regard language as something that was not objectively connected to them and into which the subjective had poured itself, just as they never lost sight of the fact that their coat is something objective and has not grown together with their body like a second skin.

[ 24 ] The second stage of language, on the other hand, encompasses the entire organism of language as it were, like a second skin of the soul, whereas language had previously been much looser—I would say, like a garment. I am now speaking of the stage of language in which the primary concern is no longer speaking beautifully, but rather speaking correctly; a stage concerned not with rhetoric and eloquence, but with logic; a stage in which grammar itself became so logical that one simply—and this has been gradually emerging since Aristotle’s time—developed logical forms from grammatical ones, abstracting the logical from the grammatical. Everything has converged there: thought and word. The sentence is that upon which one forms a judgment. But the judgment is actually embedded in the sentence in such a way that one no longer experiences it internally as something independent. Speaking correctly—that has become the hallmark.

[ 25 ] But today we are already seeing a new element of speech emerge, though it is being applied in the wrong places and transferred to an entirely inappropriate field. Humanity owes the art of eloquent speech to the East. The art of correct speech lies in the central realm of civilization. And we must look to the West if we are to find the third element.

[ 26 ] But in the West, it initially emerges in a completely corrupted form. How does it emerge? Well, to begin with, language has become abstract. What is a “word organism” is almost a “thought organism.” And in the West, this has gradually intensified to such an extent that people there might even consider it ridiculous to still discuss such matters. But progress is certainly present, albeit in an entirely wrong realm.

[ 27 ] You see, in America, a philosophical movement known as “pragmatism” emerged precisely in the last third of the 19th century. In England, it came to be called “humanism.” James is its representative in America, Schiller its representative in England. There are now figures who are already working to expand upon these ideas. Thus, the credit for having expanded this very concept of humanism in a very beautiful sense belongs to Professor Mackenzie, who was recently present here.

[ 28 ] What, then, is the ultimate goal of these endeavors? I am referring here to American pragmatism and English humanism. They stem from a complete skepticism toward knowledge: truth is something that does not actually exist! When we make two assertions, we actually make them in order to have points of reference in life. To speak of an “atom”—one cannot cite any particular basis of truth for it; but it is useful to base chemistry on atomic theory; so we establish the concept of the atom. It is practical; it is useful. There is no truth other than that which lives in concepts that are useful and applicable to life. “God”—whether He exists or not—that is irrelevant. Truth is something that is none of our business. Yet one cannot live well without positing the concept of “God”; one can truly live well by living as if there were a God. So we posit Him because it is a concept that is useful and practical for life. Whether the Earth began in accordance with the Kant-Laplace theory and will end in accordance with the mechanical theory of heat—from the standpoint of truth, no one knows anything about this—I am merely stating this now—but it is useful for our thinking to create a mental image of the beginning of the Earth and the end of the Earth in this way. This is the pragmatic doctrine of James and, in essence, also the humanistic doctrine of Schiller. After all, from the standpoint of truth, we do not even know whether human beings really have a soul. One could debate until the end of the world whether a soul exists or not, but it is useful to assume the existence of a soul if one wishes to understand all that human beings do in life.

[ 29 ] Of course, everything that occurs in one place today in our civilization spreads, in turn, to other places. And for such things that arose instinctively in the West, the German had to find something that is now more conceptual, something that can be more easily grasped intellectually. And from this arose the philosophy of “as if”: Whether or not an atom exists is irrelevant; we regard phenomena as “if” an atom existed. Whether the good can be realized or not is not something that can be decided; we view life as if the good could be realized. Whether there is a God or not is something one could argue about until the end of the world; but we view life in such a way that we act as if there were a God. There you have the “as if” philosophy.

[ 30 ] People pay little attention to these things because they think: Well, there’s James in America with his students, and there’s Schiller in England with his students; and there’s Vaihinger, who wrote *The Philosophy of “As If”*: they’re just a bunch of oddballs living in some kind of cloud cuckoo land—and what’s that got to do with anyone else!

[ 31 ] But anyone with an ear for it can already hear the “As If” philosophy echoing everywhere today: Almost everyone speaks in accordance with the “As If” philosophy. Philosophers are just a bunch of fun-loving guys. They always put into words what other people do unconsciously. If one is open-minded enough, one rarely hears anyone today who still uses their words differently—in connection with their heart and their whole soul, with their whole being—who speaks as if the matter were not exactly as they express it. People simply don’t usually have the ear to hear, in the sound and timbre of speech, that this “as if” lives within it—that, fundamentally, people throughout the entire course of civilization have already been gripped by this “as if.”

[ 32 ] But just as things usually end up in corruption, something corrupt is already evident at the outset—something that must now be developed in a higher sense for the use of language in anthroposophy, in the threefold social order, and so on. These matters are so serious, so important, that we really ought to discuss them separately. For the task at hand will be to elevate the triviality of “We use concepts because they are useful for life”—that is, to elevate this triviality of a materialistic theory of utility to the ethical realm, and perhaps, through the ethical, to the religious. For the task before us—if we wish to work in the spirit of anthroposophy and the threefold social order—is to learn more about what we can draw from history—the art of speaking beautifully, the art of speaking correctly—the art of speaking well, so that we may develop an ear for speaking well.

[ 33 ] So far, I have hardly noticed that it has been picked up on when, in the course of my lectures, I have pointed out—as I have done very frequently—this kind of endorsement, always saying that it is not enough today simply for what one says to be correct in a logical-abstract sense, but rather it is important that something be said—or refrained from saying—in a certain context; that one develops a sense that something should not only be correct, but that it is justified within its context, that it can be good in a certain context, or bad in a certain context. We must learn, beyond rhetoric and logic, a true ethics of speech. We must know how, in a certain context, we may allow ourselves to do things that would not be permitted at all in another context.

[ 34 ] Let me now use an obvious example that may already have struck some of you who were present at the recent lectures: In a certain context, I spoke of the fact that Goethe was not actually born at all. I spoke of how Goethe had long strived to express himself through painting and drawing, but that nothing came of it; that this then spilled over into his poetry; and that, in turn, his poems—such as “Iphigenia” or, especially, “The Natural Daughter”—are not at all works of poetry in the romantic sense. “Smooth as marble and cold as marble”—that’s what people have called these poems of Goethe’s, because they are almost sculptural, because they are three-dimensional. Goethe had all sorts of abilities that never actually blossomed into full humanity; he was never truly born. — You see, in the context in which I expressed this recently, one could certainly say that. But just imagine if someone were to advocate this as a thesis in and of itself, in an absolute sense! It would not only be illogical; it would, of course, be completely crazy.

[ 35 ] Speaking from the context of life is something different from finding the appropriateness or correctness of a contextual arrangement of words in relation to the context of thought and feeling. To allow a dictum or the like to emerge from a living context at a specific point—that is what leads from beauty and correctness to the ethos of language, whereby one senses, when uttering a sentence, whether one is permitted to utter it or not within the entire context. There is, in turn, an internalized fusion—not with language, but with speech. This is what I would like to call “good speech” or “bad speech”; the third form. Alongside “beautiful” and “ugly” speech, alongside “correct” and “incorrect” speech, there is “good” and “bad” speech in the sense I have just described.

[ 36 ] Even today, the view is still widespread that there are statements one can formulate and then utter on any occasion because they are universally valid. In reality, however, such statements no longer exist for our lives in the present; rather, every statement that is possible in a certain context is already impossible in another context today. This means that we have entered an epoch in human development where we need to focus our attention on this diversity of experience.

[ 37 ] The Oriental, whose entire way of thinking was confined to a small territory, and even the Greek, whose intellectual, legal, and economic life was confined to a small territory—both imbued their language with something that resembles what a linguistic work of art must look like. What, then, is the nature of a work of art? It is that, within a single, self-contained object, the infinite actually appears within a specific domain. This is, in fact—albeit one-sidedly—how beauty has been defined by Hegel, Hartmann, and others: it is the manifestation of the idea in a self-contained formal structure. This was the first point I had to challenge in my Vienna lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics”—namely, that beauty is “the manifestation of the Idea in external form”—by demonstrating that one must mean precisely the opposite: that beauty arises when one imbues form with the appearance of the infinite.

[ 38 ] And so it is with language, which, in a sense, also functions as a limited territory—a territory that encloses possible meaning within boundaries: that which is, in fact, infinite in the inner life of the soul and spirit must fit into this language. It must find expression there in a beautiful form.

[ 39 ] When speaking correctly, it must be appropriate; the sentence must fit the judgment, and the concept must fit the word. The Romans were compelled to do this, especially as their territory grew larger and larger: their language shifted from the beautiful to the logical, which is why the custom of teaching people logic specifically through the Latin language has been maintained. After all, they learned it quite well through this method.

[ 40 ] But now we have moved beyond this stage once again. Now it is necessary for us to learn to experience language with ethos, to incorporate, as it were, a kind of morality of speech into our discourse, by knowing that, within a certain context, we must allow ourselves something or deny ourselves something. Here, things do not fall into place in the way I described earlier; rather, when we use a word, we use it to characterize. Here, all defining ceases; here, the word is used to characterize. Here the word is handled in such a way that one actually perceives every word as inadequate, every sentence as inadequate, and feels the urge to characterize what one wishes to present to humanity from the most diverse angles—to circle around the subject, so to speak, and characterize it from every possible perspective. I have often emphasized that this must be the mode of presentation of anthroposophy. I have often emphasized that one should not believe one can find the adequate word or the adequate sentence, but rather one can only act like the photographer who, to show a tree, captures at least four different perspectives. Thus, a perspective that finds expression in an abstract, trivial philosophy as “pragmatism” and “humanism” must be elevated; it must be elevated into the realm of ethics. And then it must first find expression in the ethos of language: We must learn to speak well. That is to say, in speaking, we must experience something of all that we otherwise experience in relation to ethics, the doctrine of morals.

[ 41 ] And, when you get right down to it, the matter has become quite clear in recent times. In the language of the Theosophists, we find an archaism that is simply a result of the language itself—namely, archaic in relation to the last few centuries of materialistic influence: “physical body”—well, it is dense; “etheric body”—it is thinner, mist-like; “astral body”—thinner still, but really just thinner; “I”—even thinner. Now, new aspects of the human being keep appearing over and over again: it just keeps getting thinner and thinner. In the end, one no longer even knows how one can reach such thinness, but in any case, it just keeps getting thinner and thinner. One cannot escape materialism. That, after all, is the hallmark of this theosophical literature. And that is always the hallmark of what occurs whenever these matters are to be discussed—from theoretical discourse to what I once experienced within the Theosophical Society in Paris; I believe it was in 1906. There, a lady—who was a true, steadfast Theosophist—wanted to express how much she had enjoyed certain speeches that had been given in the hall where we were; and she said: “There are such good vibrations here!”—And you could tell from her tone that she actually meant it as something you sniff. So what she actually meant were the scents that had lingered from the speeches—the ones you could sort of sniff out.

[ 42 ] We must learn to free language from the constraint of adequacy. For it can be adequate only to the material. If we wish to use it for the spiritual in the sense of humanity’s current epoch of development, then we must set it free. Then freedom must enter into the use of language. And if one approaches these things not abstractly but with a sense of life, the first thing that must be introduced is the philosophy of freedom into speech, into the use of language. For this is necessary; otherwise, one will not find the transition, for example, to the characteristics of a free spiritual life.

[ 43 ] You see, when it comes to a free spiritual life—that is, a spiritual life that exists according to its own laws—there is still not much understanding of it among people today. For most people understand “free spiritual life” to mean a structure in which people live, each crowing to his own tune, where every rooster—forgive me for this somewhat strange image—crows on his own dungheap, and where the most incredible harmonies then arise from this crowing. In reality, however, harmony does indeed arise in a free spiritual life, because it is the Spirit that lives, not the individual egoists; because the Spirit can truly lead a life of its own that transcends the individual egoists.

[ 44 ] For example—and these things must be said today—there is certainly a Waldorf school spirit at our Waldorf school in Stuttgart that is independent of the teaching staff, into which the teaching staff immerses itself, and in which it is becoming increasingly clear that, under certain circumstances, one individual may be more or less capable—but the spirit has a life of its own.

[ 45 ] It is an abstraction that people still have a mental image of today when they speak of a “free spirit.” It is not reality at all. The free spirit is something that truly lives among people—one need only allow it to come into being—and it is something that works among people—one need only allow it to come into being.

[ 46 ] What I have said to you today, I have essentially said only to ensure that what we are to gain from this stems from fundamental convictions—that is, from a sense of the seriousness of the matter. Of course, I cannot expect that everyone will now go out and speak well—just as the ancients spoke beautifully and the middle generation spoke correctly! But you cannot object by saying: “What good are all our lectures to us, then, if we cannot speak well right away?” —Rather, the point is that we truly gain a sense of the gravity of the situation into which we are to immerse ourselves, knowing that: What is intended here is something so organically whole in itself that it must gradually express itself in language—a necessity of form, just as a necessity of form is expressed in the earlobe, just as it cannot be otherwise, given the nature of the whole human being.

[ 47 ] So I will try to bring into closer alignment what we understand as the content of anthroposophy and the threefold social order with the way in which it should be presented to people. And I will move more and more from the principles to the concrete and to what should underlie the practice.